Love

MAUDE and Arthur tried to save the children, and now they have failed. They have failed in all the ways that matter, in all the ways that end in children staying alive. They do not know where their son is. Their daughter is, daily, losing the strength of her gift, for every day she spends without the brother born mere minutes after she was is another day her magic weakens, at the risk of vanishing. The other children are hungry, thirsty, weak, unable to summon magic as well, for when children hunger, magic does not obey.

Magic has its rules, after all.

And now they are trapped beneath the earth, while the world moves on and they ration what food they have and watch it, still, diminish. They are no closer to finding a solution than they were before, though it has, in truth, been only a day since they discovered themselves trapped beneath the ground in a secret hiding place that no one, now, will ever be able to find, for there is no longer a portal leading back to the land above. It feels, to the children, that they have been trapped beneath the earth for weeks.

Whatever will they do?

Arthur knows they will not exist long without food and, especially, without Mercy’s ability to draw water from the ground, for she has grown far too weak. They have done what they can, kept the food portions small, turned everything they have into more food, but it is the water that confounds him. Mercy, you see, is the most powerful among his students, particularly since his daughter’s magic has, in effect, dried up outside the presence of her twin brother Theo, who disappeared in the king’s roundup, but even Mercy struggles to bring drops into the cup a girl named Ursula holds against the dirt.

“Come,” Ursula says. “You must try again.”

Arthur watches Mercy lower her staff to the place where the cup meets dirt, watches her eyes glaze, looks at the way her flaming red hair has grown dull in her hiding. He takes a deep breath. He looks at his wife. “Enough,” he says.

Mercy drops to the ground. Maude, Arthur’s pale wife, moves to lift the girl onto a chair. Mercy does not sit, though, so much as she slumps.

“But what shall we do, Father?” Hazel says. Her eyes, once the color of a spring morning sky, are now the color of fog. She is graying. They are all graying. Arthur cannot bear it. They will die, trapped beneath the very land they love.

“Hush, child,” Maude says. It is unclear whether she is speaking to her daughter or the girl who sobs in her arms.

“We shall rest,” Arthur says. “We shall rest for a time. Then we shall try again.”

“But we need water,” says one of the boys, Chester, a trickster among the group who plays tricks no longer. One can understand, perhaps, that the reality of finding oneself trapped beneath the earth with no way out leaves no room for trickery and games. His twin brother, Charles, who has always been a quiet sort where his brother was loud, puts a hand on his brother’s arm, as if to stop the words after they have already met the ears of all those gathered in the room.

There are twenty-four children squeezed in this underground home, along with Maude and Arthur. They hide for their lives. They hide, they believe, right alongside Death, though we, dear reader, can see that he is not here at all.

You see, a tiny shoe was found on the outside. A shoe that held a very large portal that has, now, been broken. Their way out no longer exists.

“We shall find water,” Arthur says. He puts on a brave face for the children, for Arthur has always been the hopeful sort. His wife, however, knows him better. She sees the uncertainty that hides in the wrinkle between his eyebrows. She knows what certainty they face.

“Rest, Mercy,” Maude says to the girl still shaking in her arms. “It is the best thing you can do for now.”

The children grow silent. The candlelight wavers around them all, huddled in a tiny kitchen carved from the earth. Maude has put a pot on the fire with the last of the water. She will fill it with the last of the vegetables so they can have something to eat, though it will not be much.

Maude looks around. So many children. So many faces. So many eyes looking desperately for a way out. Maude shivers, though it is anything but cold in this room beneath the ground. Arthur crosses the room to her side.

“We have some food stored away,” he says. She looks at this man who is her husband, this man who has seen her through every other danger in their lives. Surely he will be able to get them out of this one. Arthur looks at her and knows what she is thinking. It is not an easy knowing, this one, that someone depends on you to pull a miracle from wherever it is miracles come.

Their eyes hold for a moment, and then Maude says, “Not nearly enough. Not nearly enough to live for long. We must find a way out.”

“Yes,” Arthur says, gazing back toward the children. “We must.” He clears his throat. “In the meantime, we shall live as long as we can. Let the children eat first. They need their strength.”

“No,” Hazel says, for she has been listening to her parents, along with the others, for children know how to listen without seeming to. “We all eat, or none of us eat.”

Was there ever a braver child who lived than this Hazel? She cannot imagine a life without Maude and Arthur, the mother and father she has always admired and trusted and, most of all, loved. She knows that if they do not eat, they die, and if they die, the children shall die. All of them, for no one knows as much about magic as Arthur and Maude, though they cannot themselves practice it.

Hazel thinks of her brother, Theo. She knows he is not dead. She can feel it. He is out there somewhere. Perhaps he will find them. She knows, dear reader, that this is quite a fantastical hope, but hope does not always listen to reason.

“Yes, we all eat,” the children say, murmuring their agreement, for they know what little chance they have without Arthur and Maude.

“Perhaps I could crawl out?” says a tiny boy named Tom, whose shoe was used to create the portal that has been broken. He is the size of a thumb, so small the children must watch their steps always. “Perhaps I could crawl through the cracks in the earth.”

“And I,” says a tiny girl named Thumbelina, whom the children call Lina. She steps forward. Her blue dress is so small it looks as if it is a scrap of fabric, which it likely is, for her mother and father were very poor, and stitches this small are very hard to make, though one might argue it would take only a few stitches to make a dress to fit a girl so tiny.

“And what would you do when you escape?” Chester says. “Dig us all out?”

They grow quiet once again, though it was Chester’s attempt to make light of the situation in which they find themselves. The children though, including Chester, feel that the situation is anything but light. Laughter does not exist in this hole beneath the ground. Perhaps it once did, before a soldier of the king stumbled, with quite extraordinary luck, we might all agree, upon the tiny shoe and carried away to King Willis what link Arthur, Maude, and the children had to the outside world. But now, well. It is a somber mood that settles upon the place.

“It is too deep,” Arthur says. “We are down farther than one might imagine.” His eyes darken. “And much too dangerous. There are far more dangerous things than the king’s men in these woods. You could not travel alone.”

The children shiver, as if the same breath of ice has crossed their chests. They know the stories of these woods. They know of the boy the fairies stole once upon a time, who never returned, and the girl and her father, who disappeared in their time. They know of the goblins that turn a child into a slave. They know of the animal creatures that walk on two legs and speak with human voices.

And perhaps it is the great tension in this tomb that cracks Maude, for she buries her face in her hands and cries out, “What will we do?”

They have, perhaps, lived here too long, without venturing into the light of day, but for a simple gathering of vegetables Arthur did every eve. They are, perhaps, too trapped, too exhausted, too hollow of hope.

No one has magic strong enough to get them out of this, is what they are all thinking. No one can save them. No way out.

But there is a girl, slumped in a chair, no longer wrapped in Maude’s arms, thinking. Solving. Planning.

Might she be the very one to save them?

Yes. Perhaps she will. But first, let us turn our attention to the castle, where there is some long-awaited news.

***

WERE we to follow the very man who lucked upon a tiny shoe, we might see him racing out of the woods and into the camp, still spread on the castle lawn. We might, perhaps, see his fellow soldiers turning to look at him, for it is with great shouting and clamoring that this soldier calls for his captain. We might see Captain Sir Greyson standing before the man, looking for all the world as though a soldier of his has gone mad, and then we might see the soldier drop a tiny shoe in the palm of his captain’s hand, after which the captain might lean close for inspection and then, in a great shouting of his own, move toward the castle steps.

The soldiers, you see, have waited and waited and waited for news such as this, though one might wonder what it is a shoe might tell them. But they are ready to go home, you see, and so the smallest evidence that a foot has tread through the wood brings them one step closer to returning home.

Sir Greyson bursts into the Great Hall, the shoe in his hand. He clenches his fist around it, to ensure it is still there. “Your majesty,” he says. “Your majesty!”

His voice is triumphant, hardly able to contain the excitement that takes his legs and shakes them until they nearly buckle beneath him. For so long they have looked. For so long they have found nothing. And then, today, a shoe. A tiny shoe, to be sure, but a shoe all the same.

Sir Greyson is a smart man. He is not under any illusion that this shoe holds within it the power to send them all home, but hope, as we have agreed, is quite a strange phenomenon. He is already imagining a dinner at home with his mother tonight, if she lives still. He does not consider that this shoe might belong to any being other than one of the missing children. He does not consider that it was a shoe lost in flight, that the children are miles away by now. He does not consider that it means absolutely nothing.

We know it means something, but what is this shoe to the objectively inclined? There is no portal attached any longer. One cannot see an underground house in a tiny shoe.

Perhaps the shoe will lead to something else. This is what bursts our captain through the doors of the throne room.

Prince Virgil sits in a chair beside his father. Sir Greyson has never seen this chair before, nor does he recognize it. But he is too intent on his news to do anything more but notice it. King Willis is eating, as is most often the case, from a plate piled with sweet rolls that his page holds in two hands.

“May I approach the throne, sire?” Sir Greyson says.

King Willis does not speak, for once, with the sweet rolls in his mouth but merely inclines his head in the universal sign for “yes” when one is indisposed to say it with a word. Sir Greyson takes the steps two at a time, which puts him before the king in three steps (for the mathematically challenged, Sir Greyson covers six steps in total). He holds out his hand. The king and the prince stare at his palm.

“Well, what is it?” King Willis says.

Sir Greyson holds it closer to his king, but the king does not have the eyesight he once did as a boy. He squints but cannot make anything out. It is a very small shoe.

Prince Virgil, however, sees the shoe quite clearly. It is not one he recognizes. “A tiny shoe?” he says. “Whatever could that mean? It is much too small for the children we seek.”

In his father’s presence, Prince Virgil does not consider what might happen to the children the king pursues, though they were once his friends. The very boy King Willis seeks most was Prince Virgil’s best friend, but Prince Virgil, under his father’s influence and the mysterious hold of the royal throne (we shall come to this at a later time, dear reader. Do not worry.), cares nothing for details such as these. When he is alone in his bedchamber or with his mother, the guilt steals over him, for he is the reason his father pursues his friends. He is the one, after all, who led his father to Theo. He is the one who told the secret of his friend’s magic. He is the one who set it all in motion.

But in the throne room, Prince Virgil is merely a prince, nothing more. He is not a friend. He is not a boy who once loved a handful of village children. He is not who he was. And because Prince Virgil has taken to spending more and more time with his father and the king’s golden throne, he is losing more and more of who he was. This is the fate of those who keep foolish company, though one cannot blame our prince for spending time with his father. Is it Prince Virgil’s fault that his father is more fool than wise man? A boy cannot simply forget his father.

King Willis stands from his throne, though it is growing more and more difficult for him to do every day. “A shoe,” he says. “A tiny shoe.” He makes a sound, as if he is pondering, too, the question of his son.

“We came upon it in the Weeping Woods,” Sir Greyson says. “One of my men discovered it.”

“But what does a tiny shoe have to tell us about anything?” Prince Virgil says.

Sir Greyson looks at his prince, then back at his king. “It is the first sign of any life we have found.”

“But it could belong to anything,” Prince Virgil says. “There are fairies who wear shoes, are there not?”

Sir Greyson shakes his head. It is, to be sure, a foolish question. Fairies, of course, do not wear shoes. But Sir Greyson is a kind man. He does not answer his prince as if he is merely a child. “No, sire,” he says, for Prince Virgil will one day be his king. “Fairies are not known to bother with shoes.” He clears his throat. “There was a boy.”

“A boy?” King Willis says. His eyebrows draw low over his eyes.

“A tiny boy,” Sir Greyson says. Even now, he does not like disclosing the news, though moments ago he felt great relief at having found anything, for he, like his men, is ready to return to his home. Desperation, you see, makes a man forget his reason. And now that Sir Greyson stands before his prince and his king, he remembers the plans King Willis has for the children once they are found, and he hopes, in his heart, that they have fled to a place where his men will never find them, that they are, somehow, safe. Yet, if they are, his men will be ordered to continue searching.

How does a man walk himself out of such a conundrum?

Sir Greyson looks at the shoe. He can do nothing about the shoe now. He can do nothing about the words he has already spoken. He must say more.

“A boy in the village,” Sir Greyson says. “A boy as small as a thumb.”

The king tilts his head. “And this is his shoe?”

“There is no way of knowing for sure, sire,” Sir Greyson says. “But I suspect so.” He stares at the shoe in his palm.

“And what, pray tell, do you think it means?” King Willis says.

Sir Greyson feels the cloud settle on him. Guilt. Hope. Fear. All of those battling in a storm of thunder and lightning, in the places one cannot see. His mother. The children. His men. Their families. What did they have to return to without their children? What would his mother do without him? What is a man to do?

“They were in the forest,” Sir Greyson says, for he knows that even though many of his men have lost their children, they have not lost their wives.

How is it, you ask, that men would follow the orders of a king who has stolen their children from their homes and dimmed the light of the world? It is a quite understandable question. The king, you see, holds all the power in a kingdom like Fairendale. He controls the seeds the people receive for growing vegetables. He controls the flock of sheep that Hazel, if you remember, set free in the Weeping Woods. (We are not sure where the sheep ended up. Perhaps they returned home. Perhaps they were stolen by fairies, taken to the land that does not grow old for the amusement of the Lost Boys and Girls. They are not so important to our story just yet, so we will leave them wherever they may be.) He controls the fire, the provisions, the flow of medicine. He controls everything, except for the rising and the setting of the sun. And why, you ask, do they not leave the kingdom of Fairendale? Well, reader, is it so easy to leave your home? It is all the people have ever known. And there is hope, again. Hope does not let one give up so easily. And no matter how wretched life gets, the people of Fairendale hope. They hope that one day they will have a better kingdom. They hope that one day another king, a kinder king, will sit the throne. They hope that their hopes will come to pass.

And so the men in Sir Greyson’s army remain. They see their provisions sent to their wives and mothers. They try to forget the village that holds no laughter. They try to do their duty and carry on.

“They were in the forest,” King Willis says. “And where are they now?”

Sir Greyson swallows. He does not know. His men do not know. But he does not confess his not-knowing to the king. “We will find them,” he says instead. “Here is our first clue.” He holds the shoe up so the king can see it again. King Willis squints, but as far as his eyesight is concerned, there is nothing in Sir Greyson’s hand.

Prince Virgil, however, feels another hope, a darker hope, take root.

Perhaps they will be found. Perhaps his throne will be secured, without the gift of magic. Perhaps he will rule the land after all.

You must understand, reader. Prince Virgil, though once a kind boy, has listened, day after day, to the stories of his father, stories of grandeur and fame, and once dreams of grandeur and fame crawl inside a heart, a man (or woman or boy or girl) will do anything to see them come to pass. Everyone wants to be a part of history. Prince Virgil would be among the names of the Fairendale kings, a most revered calling. He would be feared and respected and, mostly, remembered. He does not know that one can be remembered, too, for the evil one brought to the world, and this is not a fame most would want.

Some, alas, will take fame in whatever package it comes. Prince Virgil is not so far gone as this, but he is coming closer every day, for every hour he spends sitting on his father’s throne, though King Willis does not permit it often just yet, is another hour that the light and the dark in Prince Virgil’s heart battles.

“Go, then,” King Willis says. “Find them.” He looks at his son, his lips pulled into a grin. “And when you do, bring them to me.”

“Yes, sire,” Sir Greyson says. He clutches the shoe in his palm, turns on his heel and strides toward the double doors at the back of the room. His men wait just outside the castle for new orders.

And perhaps the sound of the doors swinging open and clanking closed pulls our prince from the enchantment of this room, this throne, this king, for it is when Sir Greyson has disappeared that Prince Virgil feels the sudden twisting of his stomach.

King Willis is looking at his son. “A feast to celebrate,” the king says. “They shall be found. As we knew they would.”

Prince Virgil, truth be told, does not feel much like eating. He does not feel much like anything but following on the heels of soldiers who will search the forest once again. He would warn the children. He would bid them run. He does, after all, still love three of them. Are they alive? Are they safe?

Perhaps he might sneak out of the castle tonight and warn them. Would he be brave enough to venture into the forest?

No, of course not. He has heard the stories. The fairies. The goblins. The shape shifters. There are too many dangers. His friends, if they are in the forest, will not be there for long.

But what if the men find his friends? What if they bring them to his father? What if they die?

Do you see, dear reader, what goes on in the heart of our prince? It is not so very easy to be a prince. It is not so very easy to feel the pull of fame and the love of three people. It is not so very easy to choose between power and love.

“It is only a matter of time,” King Willis says. He pats his son, but Prince Virgil does not look at his father’s face, for the spell, for now, has been broken. “They will pay.”

“Yes,” Prince Virgil says. “They will pay.” He does not mean the words, of course. For in his heart, he whispers his treason. Do not let them have Theo or Mercy or Hazel.

Love, you see, is a powerful thing.

***

BENEATH the ground, in their home with dirt walls and floor and wooden furniture made by the deft hands of Arthur, the children do not know whether it is day or night. They have felt the vibrations of horses and men above ground, and they find themselves inclined to fall asleep to the gentle rhythm. It is not time for sleeping, though dusk is near, but the children have nothing better to do. They eat what little food is left, and then they take to their beds, trying not to think about their great thirst that will widen in the coming hours. Arthur and Maude hole up in their own bedroom. Hazel follows Mercy to the one they share, the other girls retiring to their own. Bunks fold into the earth in a quite remarkable way. One has only to touch a staff to the ground, and out the beds come. Hazel and Mercy sit on Hazel’s perfectly made bed. They do not speak for a time. Mercy fingers the blanket that wrinkles where they sit. Hazel’s bed looks much different than her own, for Mercy could never see the point of making a bed she would sleep in again.

There is so much to be said between the two friends, but they do not quite know how to say it.

Hazel, who keeps a rigid back most of the time, slumps on the bed. “I do not know what we will do,” she whispers, as if she wants no one else to hear her, though the other girls are tucked away in their own rooms. “I do not know how we will survive.”

Mercy takes her friend’s hand. “We will survive,” she says. “We did not come so far to give up so easily.”

“But we have no more food,” Hazel says. “We have no water.” She looks at her friend, as if afraid of the words she has just said. “I am sorry. I do not mean it is your fault.”

Mercy dips her head. “We are all doing what we can,” she says. “It is not easy with our hunger.”

“No,” Hazel says. “We thought we were hungry in the village.” Her voice catches at the end of it, for Hazel loved her village home and misses it now. She misses, too, the sheep she used to lead, every morning and afternoon, to the freshwater cove for a drink and then back to their grazing fields. She even misses the taunts of the mermaids.

Mercy puts an arm around Hazel’s shoulders. Hazel leans on her friend.

“I miss Theo,” Hazel says.

Mercy nods against the top of her head. “Me too,” she says.

They both wonder the same questions, but they do not dare wonder aloud. Is he still alive? Has he been captured? Will he find safety?

“I know he is alive,” Hazel says into the silent chasm. “I would feel it if he was not.” In truth, Hazel has grown weaker and weaker every day. She fears it is because her twin grows weaker and weaker every day. She hopes it is merely the hunger. But she has little magic left, if any. It is known that a twin dying strips the magic from the remaining twin. Hazel looks at her staff, resting in the corner with Mercy’s. She longs to try. To know. But she does not dare.

“No,” Mercy says, as if she knows precisely what it is her friend is thinking. “You must not try. You must not waste what little magic remains.”

“But what if there is none left?” Hazel says. She feels the fear burning her eyes. She blinks them.

“There is,” Mercy says.

“But we do not know for sure,” Hazel says.

“We must trust,” Mercy says. “And we must rest.”

Mercy climbs to her bed above Hazel’s, and the girls lie in their separate places, joined by the minds that do not give in so easily to sleep.

We must rest so we can die, Hazel thinks.

It may work, Mercy thinks.

For Mercy, you see, has a plan.

***

ACROSS the dirt hall, Arthur and Maude sit on their bed in much the same way Mercy and Hazel did. They sit close, their shoulders touching. Maude slumps. Arthur straightens. They think and do not speak, until Arthur says, “I am sorry.”

Arthur, you see, feels as if this burying, this trap beneath the ground, is his fault. It was, after all, his idea to create an underground portal, held in place by a tiny shoe. Perhaps he should have chosen something more permanent. A boulder. A tree. A cave. But a tiny shoe. What are the odds that someone would find a tiny shoe? What are the odds that it would be disturbed from its place, deep in the woods? The king’s men must be growing desperate. He should have known.

And now they are trapped, unable to escape. They have eaten their last bowl of carrot soup, for there are no more carrots, and there is no more water. What will they do? How will they survive? Magic has its limits. It cannot keep them alive.

“Oh, Arthur,” Maude says. She lays her head on his shoulder, as if they are the very picture of Hazel and Mercy, adults where children sat moments ago. Arthur strokes her hair. He ponders in silence. Maude nearly falls asleep, she is so exhausted. Fear, you see, does different things to different people.

Arthur listens to his wife’s gentle breathing. He moves his arm around her shoulder so that she falls against him. She is warm and beautiful, as she was all those years ago. He kisses the top of their head. They will die. There is no hope. There is no way out of this trap beneath the earth. And what strikes the most fear in the heart of a man like Arthur is that it will not be a quick and easy death. It will be a slow one. A torturous one. Perhaps it would have been better to let the king’s men catch the children in the very beginning. Perhaps he should have known they could not stay here forever. Perhaps he should not have ventured back into the lands of his youth.

“Okay, then,” Arthur says. Maude startles awake. “Sorry to wake you.”

“Okay then?” Maude says, her face brightening with hope, as if, perhaps, Arthur’s sudden words mean he has thought of a way out of death.

He shakes his head. He has only, you see, come to terms with dying. He turns to his wife and takes both of her hands in his. “It will not be an easy death,” he says.

“No,” Maude says.

“We will have to help the children,” Arthur says.

“Yes,” Maude says. Tears stream down her face. Arthur folds her in his arms.

“I am sorry, love,” he says. “I am sorry I failed you.”

“You did not fail us,” Maude says. “How could we have known what would happen?”

“It is an underground home,” Arthur says. “It is a portal. There are always dangers.”

“You kept us alive,” Maude says. Her voice is muffled against his chest. “For the time it mattered. And Theo...”

She does not finish her thought, but Arthur knows what she intended to say. Theo might yet be alive. And that matters for something as well, though it makes their dying that much more difficult. His son, alone. Where is he? Why had he run the other way, when the plan had been the woods? They might have used his magic, and Hazel’s, too.

Neither of them speaks for a time. And then Maude says, “Is there not something we can do, Arthur? Anything? Some little bit of magic left?”

Arthur shakes his head. “The children are too weak,” he says. “The magic would be more powerful than they are.” Everyone knows what happens when a magician cannot control his power. The magic will take over, turning good intentions to bad. Magic, you see, does not like its natural hierarchy. Magicians have always been stronger than magic. And so magic will take control wherever it might, which makes it quite dangerous for a magician to practice when he is already weak.

“What about Hazel?” Maude says. “Perhaps she has a bit left. She has not used any magic since we left the village.”

“She has been without Theo for far too long,” Arthur says. “Asking her to use what might be left would risk the loss of her magic forever.”

Maude knows this, of course. But she is thinking of the children. She is wondering if Hazel would do this for the children. “Is not life more important than magic?” Maude whispers. “Can one not live without magic?”

Arthur lets out a long breath. “Of course,” he says. “But then what?” He looks toward the ceiling. Maude pulls away.

“Then we escape,” she says.

“What is waiting in the woods?” Arthur says. “We do not know if it is night or day.”

“It matters not,” Maude says. “What is out there is nothing to what it is in here, what we face when the children wake from their sleep. Why not give them this hope? At least we will have tried.”

“The king’s men wait in the woods,” Arthur says.

“We will run,” Maude says. “As we did before.”

“We will run forever,” Arthur says. “They will never stop their pursuit.”

“I will run forever,” she says. “The children will run forever. To stay alive.”

Arthur shakes his head, but, in the end, he knows his wife is right. They will have to ask their daughter to use her magic. It is the only thing left.

And then they will have to risk whatever waits for them in the Weeping Woods.

***

THE shadows stretch long and narrow in the secret shelter beneath the village fountain. There is a woman here, a woman of bright green eyes and flame-colored hair, who looks like one of the children in our story.

She has, in fact, lost a child in this story.

And so she is desperate, as any mother would be, to save the children, for she loves her daughter with a great, unceasing love. She misses her daughter’s bright green eyes and flame-colored hair. She misses the magic her daughter made in their cottage, turning azaleas to roses, mending old shoes, making a blanket from a scrap of cloth to replace the one with holes in it. She had this gift once upon a time, though she never learned to tame it as her daughter had. There had not been an Arthur in the village when she was a girl.

There are other people who gather in this room. There are men who have lost sons and grandmothers who have lost grandchildren and mothers, like her, who have lost their daughters. They all want the same thing: the children returned. The children safe. The children back in their homes, back in the streets, back in a laughter-filled world.

“Where are they?” a man in the corner says. He has a gruff face, a gruff voice, a gruff appearance with his furry chin and wrinkled red tunic and brown breeches of varying length on each leg. The green belt tied about his waist is too loose, for the people of Fairendale do not fare well in these days after the children’s disappearance. There is no reason to eat, most of the time. Though when a body is hungry enough, it will eat. This man has lost his twin boys and an older son. He does not understand why his boys would be in danger at all, for they do not seek a throne. They do not have what it takes to rule a kingdom, for they were not born with magic. They are simply boys. Missing boys. Loved boys. Cora knows this man to be Garron, the village gardener.

“I do not know where the children are,” says the woman with flaming hair. “The dungeon, we hope.”

The people murmur. If one were standing in this candlelit room, one might hear words like, “The dungeon?” and “That is what we hope?” and “Surely not.”

“Do you think they are safe?” a woman says. Her eyes are red-rimmed, as if she has been crying. Many of the mothers, you see, have been crying since the day they lost their children. A mother, though not always grateful, perhaps, for the untidiness children bring to a home, always loves her children. It is, in fact, love that has brought them all here, though they wanted nothing more than to remain in their beds and wither away, as it seems the land of Fairendale has begun to do.

“No,” Cora says, though she would like nothing more than to say otherwise. “I do not think any children are safe in the kingdom now.”

“What will we do?” another woman calls out. Cora does not know these village people all that well, for she never had much need to know them. Her daughter studied magic with Arthur and Maude. She knows the baker, the shoemaker, the tailor, the book binder, the gardener. Only the ones she needs to know. She is accustomed to living a somewhat lonely life, for she was always different from the rest of them. But they need a leader, and a leader they shall have.

“We will go to war,” another man shouts, from the middle of the hunched crowd. The other villagers murmur their approval.

Cora knows that the people are untrained for something as violent as war. She has other plans, plans that will involve moving silently, bleeding the castle a day at a time. So she waits until the room has quieted once more, until the candles have settled into a straight-line flicker, rather than a reaching one.

“No,” Cora says. “Not yet. Now is the time for planning. For building. For gathering strength and numbers.”

The people look at one another. They are gaunt and pale, with purple circles painting the undersides of their eyes. They do, in fact, look worse for wear, as they say. They look as if they may be dying, slowly, though if one were to look with eyes that could truly see, one would not see Death lurking in the shadows of Fairendale any longer. Death is satisfied, for now, though there is no knowing when his hunger will return.

Death, you see, has moved on to stand guard at another place, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.

“We must move before it is too late,” says a ragged man with black eyes. “Before the children are lost.”

“The children are already lost,” Cora says. “We shall find them again, bring them back to our homes, but our plans will take time.”

“Plans?” a woman says. A hooded cloak covers her body, bright red. It does not seem to fit, as if, perhaps, it belongs, instead, to a child. Might this woman have a missing child who used to wear this cloak? Why, yes. This woman is wearing her daughter’s cloak, and it is a tragic sight.

“Who has made plans?” the woman says.

“I have,” Cora says, and she holds a roll of parchment tied with a string so that all the people can see it. “If we are to defeat King Willis, we must have a plan.” She unties the string and rolls the parchment out on a nearby table. The people huddle around her, though not everyone can see, for it is a small table, and there are more people than Cora might have expected. This will be good for her plan.

“What we must first do,” Cora says, “is return to our duties in the village.” She points to the baker. “You, Bertie, must bake bread.” She points to the village gardener. “And you, Garron, must tend to the vegetables.” She looks around at the people, meeting as many eyes as she can. “We must eat to gain our strength. We must survive.”

“But without the children...” a woman from the back says. She is wrinkled and slumped. This woman, you see, had twelve children, and they have all gone missing, except for the oldest one, who is not much of a boy any longer. He remains at the castle, undiscovered. He brings her what he can, but it is not so often as it once was.

“Yes, without the children,” Cora says. “Without the children, our work will be harder. But we must help one another. We must share generously with our fellow villagers.”

Perhaps Cora knows what words such as these might do for the people of Fairendale. Perhaps she has no idea. It matters not. When they hear the words, it is with a sense of community, a sense of brotherly and sisterly affection, a sense of family. While it is true that Fairendale, in the days before the roundup, boasted of good relationships, in the days after, the people have taken to their beds and hardly see one another. They hardly remember their fellow villagers’ names. They hardly know how to live.

It is with a gratefulness of greater depth than words can express that the people turn their faces back to their leader, this woman with scarlet hair and white skin and eyes that hold them fast in the waters of peace and courage and, mostly, hope.

Cora directs them to the plans laid out on parchment—a strengthening time, a stealing time, a training time, and, when all the pieces have fallen into place, an attacking time.

“There is a time,” Cora says, ending her speech, “for everything.”

The people are silent for some moments, hardly daring to breathe. They do not know if they can do what is asked of them to do. Waiting for so many days? How is it possible to go about life as if nothing has changed, when the streets and their homes do not vibrate with the laughter and presence of their children? How can they bear to tend their gardens and their bakeries and their shoe-making shops, all the pieces of village life, without the children watching and learning and, as they can, helping? How is it that they might do nothing, absolutely nothing, to save their children when they do not yet know where their children sleep or if they live or whether they are forever lost? Is it not dire to immediately begin the search for their children?

“Will it work?” a woman close to Cora whispers. Cora knows her to be the baker’s wife. “Will your plan work?”

“One can never know whether a plan will work in its entirety,” Cora says. “One must simply try. And hope. And, perhaps, try again.”

The villagers, of course, know this. They have lived more than enough years to have learned about trying and failing and trying again, and yet it is astounding what one can forget in the grip of tragedy. This is a tragedy of the highest order for the people of Fairendale, I am sure we can all agree.

Bertie’s bald head glows in the candlelight. He nods it. “Yes,” he says. “We must try.”

“We must plan for food,” Cora says, nodding toward him.

“I will need wheat,” he says.

“Perhaps the wheat is not so very badly ruined,” says Garron, the gruff man in a red tunic. He would do anything to save his three boys. “It is a hearty strain.”

“We will harvest at first light,” Cora says. “Whatever we can. We will all work together.”

The people murmur around them.

“Garron, you will lead us in mending the gardens,” Cora says. “With our help, perhaps it can be nurtured back to its former abundance.”

“It has been many days,” Garron says. “The wheat might be saved, but the rest, I fear, might be lost. And without new seeds from the castle...” He does not go on.

Cora tries not to think what that might mean. The people could not survive on just wheat. “We will do what we can,” she says.

“And if your plan does not work?” says the woman with twelve children. She has watery blue eyes and a sagging chin.

“Then we will plan again,” Cora says.

“We will not give up?” says the woman in a child’s red cloak.

“No,” Cora says. “We will not rest until our children are returned to us.”

At this, the villagers nod their heads. Yes. They will fight for their children until their children return home. This is, after all, what parents do.

The room grows quiet again. Someone sniffs in the back.

“We will meet at the gardens at first light,” Cora says.

The people nod.

“You must file out one by one,” Cora says. “In case there are watching eyes.”

There are no watching eyes, of course, for the kingdom is much too concerned with the shoe that was found in the forest. But it is never a bad idea to exercise caution in the most dangerous of situations.

Cora is the last one in the room. She looks over her plans, wavering in the candlelight, and then she rolls up the parchment, ties the string around it and slips out of the underground meeting place. The lights in the village homes flicker out, one by one, until the whole world goes dark.

***

SHOULD the townspeople have looked, on stepping out of their secret meeting place, toward the dark wood, and should they have extraordinary night vision, they might have seen a small boy, standing at the edge of the forest. They might have seen him lift his head back to stare at the moon, a small sliver in the sky, almost not there at all, which, of course, makes the night darker than it would be were the moon full and white. They might have seen him take one small step forward and then stop. Another step forward and another stop. Another step, but this one back.

Do you see him? He is, perhaps, slightly hard to see, for he is dressed in a black robe, the robe his mother ordered specially when one was needed for a special princely presentation when he was a boy of six. So it is a bit tight and a bit more short. His breeches are made of the finest cloth, though on a black night like this, one cannot tell. His boots, laced up to the calf, are black as well, so he appears, you see, invisible. Upon leaving the castle, he thought this black night would serve him well, but as he stands before the woods he has never entered but has heard about in fearful tales, he does not so much like the small moon and its not-shining.

Prince Virgil is faced with the most complicated of decisions. Should he enter, for the sake of finding his friends? Should he risk his life and the ire of the fairies, who are known to take anyone who wanders the woods when the sun has vanished, with his trespassing, though he does not know if his friends wait inside? Should he return back home, back to his warm bed, back to the fire that waits to not only warm but also to light his chambers?

He does not feel like a brave boy. A brave boy would have no trouble stepping within the cover of trees. But Prince Virgil, a very decidedly not-brave boy, waits. Stares. Feels a heart flipping wildly in his chest.

And then, alas, a creature from within the dark woods, growls. Another creature howls. And yet another hoots, and as Prince Virgil stares, the dark forest fills with eyes. And so he turns. He flees. He leaves his friends to their fate, which is, perhaps, as it should be.

Prince Virgil runs for his very life, for he does not know whether the creatures within the wood follow him. He does not look back. He stumbles on the path, numerous times, but then he sees the bridge, and he has only to cross it to be safe from whatever may have followed him. He has only to make it to that bridge, and whatever evil pursues him will not cross. He knows this from stories his mother used to tell him as a young boy. So though he is tired, for he runs harder than he has ever run before, Prince Virgil summons enough energy to run even harder. Fear, as it happens, is an excellent motivator.

Somewhere above our prince a bird watches, flying along with him, its wings keeping time with the steps of our prince, who appears, at a distance, like an oversized bird himself, for his black cape flaps behind him like great, magnificent wings.

Prince Virgil is terrified of birds. It was a bird, you see, who tore out the eyes of his grandfather and hastened the former king’s death. Might this bird be the very one that visited his grandfather on a night much like this one? Might this bird be a foe? Might this bird be flying for blood?

Fortunately, our prince does not see this bird. Fortunately, it is too high in the black sky. Fortunately, it does not speak its ominous cry.

So it is a mystery what trips up Prince Virgil’s steps on the bridge. Is it a rock? A hand? Another bird, waiting?

What is happening now, dear reader? Could that be Prince Virgil’s head, careening toward stone? Could that be his body spread flat on the ground, as if he has spent every ounce of his being on this terrified run? Could that be a bird, perched on his back, while his cheek presses stone?

Why, yes. Yes it is.